For the past several weeks, volunteers have gathered at St. Elias Maronite Catholic Church on Birmingham’s Southside to roll grape leaves, make spinach and meat pies and prepare kibbee for the church’s annual Lebanese Food & Culture Festival.

Desserts include such traditional Lebanese sweets such as baklawa, a thinly layered pastry filled with walnuts, pecans and pistachios; kaak, which are sugar cookies; mamoul, which are cookies filled with dates and walnuts; cashew fingers, which are rolled pastries filled with ground cashews; and zlaybah, which are Lebanese doughnuts. The desserts are $2 and $3 each, and a sampler is available for $15.

With the possible exception of George’s Lebanese Restaurant in Homewood, many of the dishes served at the festival are not available in Birmingham on a regular basis, festival co-chair Paul Bolus says.

“The flatbread, you just can’t get that anywhere,” he says. “It’s an art to make that flatbread. There are only three women that we know of in the city who still do it, and yet we have them doing it live here during the festival and serving it hot.”

This year, the festival has added a coffee shop in the Heritage Room, where guests may sip coffee and eat sweets while they learn more about the history of the church.

In addition to the food, the festival features traditional dancing by the children of St. Elias tonight and throughout the day and night on Saturday.

The Amin Sultan Lebanese Band of New York will be back to perform tonight and Saturday in the tent outside the church from 6 to 9:30 p.m.

Although the festival is relatively new, Birmingham’s Lebanese heritage goes back to the early 1900s, Bolus says.

“A lot of (Lebanese) people settled in the Southeast — a lot in Kentucky, originally — but when Birmingham became a boomtown in about 1905, a lot of people came to Birmingham to be a part of that boomtown because it was the place where you could make money, it was where you had opportunity,” he says.

The St. Elias Parish was founded in 1910, and the church moved into its current location in 1950.

The festival dates back to 1999, when Bolus, an attorney for Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, and his brother Norman Bolus, who teaches nuclear medicine technology at UAB, founded the event.

Having attended the St. George Middle Eastern Food Festival and the Greek Food Festival at Holy Trinity-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral, the Bolus brothers thought St. Elias should have a food and cultural festival of its own, and they got the blessings of the church members to do so.

That first year, though, the festival went over its $10,000 budget weeks before the event, and the organizers had to go to individual church members for donations to keep it afloat.

“We had spent $30,000 before we opened the doors to the festival that first year,” Paul Bolus says.

But their financial fears were allayed after the first day.

“I will never forget about 1 o’clock in the morning after that first Friday, the treasurer of church said, ‘I don’t know what y’all were expecting, but we have taken in a little over $30,000,” Bolus says. “We knew that meant we had broken even that first day

“Then we went on to do $30,000 the next day, so we ended up making $30,000 that first year.”

About 3,000 people attended that first festival, and this year, Bolus expects about 8,000 guests.

As the festival has grown, so has its reach, Bolus says.

“This year, we already know we will have people from Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida attending our event because they have let us know they are coming.” he says. “So it has become more than just even a state event now. It’s become a regional event, at least within the Lebanese community.”

Each year, the festival donates 25 percent of its profits to charities unrelated to the church, and has given more than $240,000 over the past 13 years, Bolus says.

Last year’s festival started two days after the catastrophic April 27 tornado outbreak that devastated much of the state.

Anticipating that attendance would be down — and it was, about 15 percent, Bolus says — festival volunteers worked with Magic City Harvest to donate the leftover food to tornado victims in Pratt City and to other shelters in the area.

“Magic City Harvest coordinated all of that,” Bolus says. “We loaded up the trucks for them, and they drove the trucks out there and set it all up and served it. So that was a great combo effort.”

This year’s festival takes place from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. today and Saturday, and admission is free.

Parking is available tonight and all day Saturday in the UAB parking lot on 10th Avenue South next to the Epic School lot and in the UAB lot on Eighth Street South across from the University Autoplex car dealership. Shuttle buses will run between both lots and the church from 5 to 9 p.m. both nights.